Cambridge University deploys improved IT service desk

Cambridge University is improving its IT service to 2,000 students and staff with a new customer support desk.

Antony Savvas
April 15, 2013

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Cambridge University is improving its IT service to 2,000 students and staff with a new customer support desk.

The Clinical School Computing Service (CSCS) at Cambridge University has chosen to deploy LANDesk's Service Desk 7.5 to deliver a better customer experience and greater transparency across its IT operations.

CSCS provides and supports IT across a number of departments in the University's School of Clinical Medicine and to affiliated research groups.

LANDesk’s system will support CSCS’s 2,000 users across 80 customer groups affiliated with the University. Previously CSCS was using several software applications to manage its service desk, including one to log incidents and service requests, one to record assets, and one to record users and billing information.

Cambridge said "constant manual intervention" created room for error. For instance, key data had to be manually copied each month between the applications to facilitate the monthly billing, and the billing reports were manually run, printed and posted to customers. And as the applications were not easily customisable, said CSCS, any changes to functionality required not only in-depth knowledge of the individual systems but also appropriate programming skills.

Mihaela Damian, project manager at CSCS, said: “As one of the largest providers of IT services at the University we have thousands of customers relying on us to support them and their devices quickly and accurately."

Damian added: "With our dated, disparate systems we just weren’t able to keep up with the number of incidents or complexity of issues, which caused frustrations. We knew we needed to upgrade to a service desk that could guarantee accuracy and simplicity.”

LANDesk has helped to merge all databases into a single system, increasing efficiency in the team and reducing overall costs, said Damian.

"Our teams now have more time to focus on customer support rather than back-end problems," she said.